HL might have been somewhat more linear than classic shooters, but:
- classic shooters have never been particularly nonlinear anyway.
- HL was also a lot more structured than most shooters out there which was an immensely welcome change that made it easy to overlook any linearity.
- HL had actually very solid systems - gunplay, AI - accompanied by very good graphics.
It really depends what you mean by linear vs non-linear. A lot of those maze levels in id and Raven games were non-linear even if you played one after another and even if you had to get keycards in a certain order.
Unless you could choose *how* to beat a level (sometimes you could, but it was rare) all this "nonlinearity" actually amounted to backtracking.
I don't mean to disparage early FPS (Doom engine, Build, etc.) level design, because it was involved, fun, very good in a semi-abstract dungeon crawl sort of way and required player to put some effort into constructing mental models of their surroundings (or would were it not for automap), but their degree of nonlinearity is vastly overrated.
3) A feature doesn't automatically translate into fun. The variety in enemy's battle behaviors in HL was poor.
The fuck are you smoking?
This is just flat out wrong. Marines actually acted almost like people, while headcrabs, zombies, and the little dog things just charged in, then the other aliens had distinct behaviors different from them.
This. If anything Doom had almost no variety of enemy behavours. In HL it was actually one of game's main strengths (and one of the most hyped ones) - not how smart the AI was (it was nice and pretty impressive at the time, but not that ingenious) but how differently enemies behaved.
Marines tried to emulate military tactics, assassins engaged in flanking and hit&run - quite effectively too (BTW: their AI is awfully wrong in Black Mesa), pretty much each type of aliens behaved differently and sometimes even used different senses to track you, vortigaunts could be non-aggressive if not sicced at you and had easily broken morale (running, giving up or pretending to give up only to zap you in the back), houndeyes worked in packs, etc.
The original HL was *THE* go-to game where it came to enemy behaviour variety.
Anyway, regarding level design and other things I noticed that often games that offer greater variety of things are paradoxically accused of having less variety. My explanation for this is that when a game tries to include broader spectrum of something (with 'something' standing for about anything - weapon variety, enemy variety, things happening in levels, etc.) it's easy to further subdivide it into categories and then fixate on just one of them. For example almost every enemy in Doom was essentially a biped (exceptions - souls, tomatoes, spiders) trying to kill you at range (exceptions souls, demons) with colorful projectiles or hitscan. In HL you had maybe 4 such regularly occuring bipeds - BOOO!...t wait that omits all the animal-like aliens, turrets, AH-64, and also omits enemies that are similar enough to be considered "the same" to untrained eye, but different enough to pose different gameplay challenges, for example different types of grunt.
HL might have missed dungeon crawl-esque mazes, but overall it's doing a lot of things in its levels.
Sceptic , anyone interested
You might find this interesting enough:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131815/the_cabal_valves_design_process_.php
I'm always quite surprised when people say that Half Life 1&2 are "Herald of the Decline". There have been countless discussion about the subject, but as far as I can see HL 1&2 are anything but the forefathers of the modern retarded shooter.
Sure, they introduced the "scripted" events, but they were in HL1 quite small, set-pieces that could even be lost or ignored, bar in some specific cases. Let's see....
A lot of scripting was just to telegraph the nature of dangers and not have players learn by dying which is awful design. At very few points did it actually take control away from the player.
1) Level Design. Anyone that says that HL1 had "realistic" level design has not played it recently. A ton of HL1 levels have only graphics that make them seem "realistic", but they don't make any sense in a real building. Factories work as platforming sections, parking lots and hangars are well-built arenas with different enemies and enviromental hazards. Even HL2 mantains some of the "game" logic of his forefather. I'll freely admit that they are less creative than Doom Levels, but fights in HL1 are anything but CoD script fests.
Well, I always assume it to mean "...compared to DOOM". And yeah, scripting in HL is thankfully more of a background thing. As it should be.
3) Plot, dear god plot. If I read this thread, Half Life seems to be Planescape: Torment. God, Marathon has a more complex and interesting plot than Half Life. And its levels also follow a somewhat plot-dictated progression (you have to board the Phfor ship, for example). HL plot started to became a cancer in the Episodes, when they attempted to sell "emotional engagement" for whatever reason. All the other crap? Xen? Missile silos? Labs? Slave to gameplay. See Opposing Forces and the ton new enemies thrown in to enhance the gameplay options.
HL's plot is only worth mentioning by how well it's told by gameplay.
4) Half Life 2 is the last gasp of the traditional PC shooter. There is a reason there has not been a sequel: the genre is dead. HL2 with all its problems had still a lot of characteristics of the "traditional PC shooter". I get the impression that it's rather nice to hate it, but we see the last gasp of a dying genre and we point it as the culprit. Rather peculiar. If HL was the creator of the Decline, why we don't have sequels and the Episodes died quietly? And why we have CoD 11 or 12 and countless Halo clones?
Well, HL2 was a regression in many ways - pattern attacking enemies, super-durable protagonist, weak enemy missiles, less variety. I still liked it, but it had some failings.
Half Life 2 was one of the last specimens of what I like to call "the Second Generation" of PC shooters, that had titles from Shogo to AvP2 to Jedi Outcast to the first Fear, to -sigh- Unreal 2. Different from the traditional and God-given proper FPS of the early-mid '90, but still somewhat creative in design.
I know what you mean, but have some trouble placing some games in their generations.
Strife and System Shock were probably the earliest 2nd gen games, but what about Unreal or Build games? 1.5?
Also "sigh" should have been "barf".
And this is the major reason modern FPSs suck so much - they don't have any level design to speak of.
I would stomach bad level design if modern shooters done right
essential part of fps genre - good gunplay.
If I had to list three FPS games with exceptional gunplay they would be System Shock 1, Half-Life 1 and STALKER SoC.